FFA (PSA) Full solo in (Bedrock) FFA is unplayable with its current buggy state.

[betty's oldies]

UPDATE MAY 15: mixed kit/exchange items bug is patched.

This is a post meant to warn those who are currently playing FFA (and in particular play alone in FFA). There's been several undocumented updates that have also introduced some (game breaking) bugs to the game. At its current state, it is unplayable for those who fully solo as they'll be in an inherent disadvantage against solo players who have support from others.

Bugs added are as follows (anything in bold heavily affects gameplay):

• Killing players via environmental damage is no longer guaranteed to give you the kill. I'm not sure exactly how this occurs, as it's clearly not based on dealing most damage; even dealing the most damage before the player dies to environmental damage doesn't always grant the kill to the killer.
• (Patched as of last week) Kills were shown to give "points"; however, the point system does not exist on Bedrock.
• (Patched as of last week) Custom kill messages from the battle arena rank weren't fully colored in cyan.
• (Patched as of May 15) A new bug was recently introduced where players can exchange items with each other. This means it is possible to see a samurai kit (speed 2) equipped with FULL diamond armor, sharpness 2 (no knockback) sword, archer bow, arrows, and potions. This defeats the entire purpose of FFA where each kit has its pros and cons, as players can instead create one super kit that has no drawbacks and gets all the benefits from every kit in the game. Note that this is considered bug abuse, but there are many players in FFA lobbies abusing this bug.
• (c. May 13 minor update) Health bar indicators are now displayed far above player nametags. Previously, health bar indicators were displayed only a couple pixels above player nametags.

It looks like another FFA major update is coming soon. Documented on the Discord server is a minor change where arrows now trigger combat.

EDIT: See changelog below; changes for Bedrock FFA that not listed on the official server's #changelog channel will be documented here.

 

[betty's oldies]

Changelog will be written here but only for undocumented changes.

• c. May 15: Fixed a bug where players could exchange items.
• c. May 13: another update was released (exact date and time unknown). New bug introduced.

 

[Siza]

I play a lot of FFA on Java. Some of the bugs you described were also an issue on Java, and I agree that it is annoying.
Though I think reporting the bugs is the best thing you can do as the developers will take a closer look at it, and hopefully fix the issues.

 

[betty's oldies]

Update! The mixed kit bug was patched!